Well, well, I hit the Submit button too soon. Anyway, most common workloads are already seeing decreasing benefits around 32 parallel threads.

The current limit on Linux (with 2.6 series) is 8192 CPUs on POWER and 4096 on x86. And there are even a number of non-x86 machines today that reach these sizes in a cache-coherent (ccNUMA) manner that Linux works well on. You still have to be careful with application design, though, because it's fairly easy to hit bottlenecks either in the application or in the kernel that will limit scalability. Most common workloads are already seeing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems I think the system described in the TED talk is the Prêt à Voter system.

Inside the IBIS there is two full SATA drive boards, with SandForce SATA controllers, connected to a standard PCIe/SATA RAID controller on the base board.

The only difference to a SATA RAID controller and two regular SSDs is that the cable is in a different place.

It just means the clone will have to be a bit more expensive.

Cloned tags aren't using the same cheap chips that the common passive tags do. An attacker can afford to carry batteries with him and make the tag completely locally powered. Then he has much more powerful electronics at his disposal and can simulate whatever frequency response the original tag had due to its cheap (few cents per tag) design.

This fingerprinting will do no more than to force the attacker to pay a few bucks more to create a clone.

The article assumes that when within a RAID5 array a drive encounters a single sector failure (the most common failure scenario), an entire disk has to go offline, be replaced and rebuilt.

That is utter nonsense, of course. All that's needed is to rebuild a single affected stripe of the array to a spare disk. (You do have spares in your RAID setups, right?)

As soon as the single stripe is rebuilt, the whole array is again in a fully redundant state again - although the redundancy is spread across the drive with a bad sector and the spare.

Even better, modern drives have internal sector remapping tables and when a bad sector occurs, all the array has to do is to read the other disks, calculate the sector, and WRITE it back to the FAILED drive.
The drive will remap the sector, replace it with a good one, and tada, we have a well working array again. In fact, this is exactly what Linux's MD RAID5 driver does, so it's not just a theory.

Catastrophic whole-drive failures (head crash, etc) do happen, too. And there the article would have a point - you need to rebuild the whole array. But then - these are by a couple orders of magnitude less frequent than simple data errors. So no reason to worry again.

*sigh*

It's just 75% increased emission rate, not 75% less energy. Continuous wave photoluminiscence doubles, though, according to the article. 75% more efficient would've been four times the output. So not THAT great, but still rather awesome.

Actually, the article on Medical News is about a different, yet also remarkable anti-cancer drug from the same company.

Making such a beginner mistake as forgetting to connect the oxygen supply hose to the batteries ...

Indeed, the term Darwinism is mainly used by Creationists, the same way that Allopathy is a term coined by practitioners of Homeopathic medicine.

And the reason for that is because creating such a duality makes it seem that both approaches are equally valid. I'm sure there are many more examples ...

Not true.

If you're going downhill, on any modern car the best is to shift into a high gear (4-6th, depending o the speed you're going downhill), such that you engine is running barely above idle RPM.

Then, the ECU will shut off the fuel supply altogether, and basically go into engine braking mode instead of keeping the engine in rotation by supplying it with a trickle of fuel. The braking effect in 6th gear is however minimal and thus even a very small slope is enough to keep the car going at a constant speed.